Is Supervised Learning Really That Different from Unsupervised?

Abstract

We demonstrate how supervised learning can be decomposed into a two-stage procedure, where (1) all model parameters are selected in an unsupervised manner, and (2) the outputs y are added to the model, without changing the parameter values. This is achieved by a new model selection criterion that - in contrast to cross-validation - can be used also without access to y. For linear ridge regression, we bound the asymptotic out-of-sample risk of our method in terms of the optimal asymptotic risk. We also demonstrate that versions of linear and kernel ridge regression, smoothing splines, k-nearest neighbors, random forests, and neural networks, trained without access to y, perform similarly to their standard y-based counterparts. Hence, our results suggest that the difference between supervised and unsupervised learning is less fundamental than it may appear.

Paper accepted at AISTATS 2026